Image is everything

Some people are their own worst enemies. Take, for example, the rather eccentric-looking chap in the photograph below. He appears to have rather clumsily allowed himself to be portrayed as a depraved menace when he is but a makeover away from becoming a card-carrying member of The Great and The Good.

A network of “suicide gurus” who use the internet to advise people how to kill themselves has been exposed…

One of the most notorious figures on the internet suicide scene is Nagasiva Yronwode, a self-confessed Satanist who runs a shop selling occult books and charms in the small Californian town of Forestville, north of San Francisco.

Yronwode, 46, describes himself as the “outreach director” for an extremist cult called the Church of Euthanasia, which advocates suicide as a means of saving the world from the effects of overpopulation.

Does this self-defeating fool not appreciate just how seductive his central message would be to the bien pensant? Indeed, they are treading water just waiting for someone like him (only a plausible, marketable version) to come along. All he needs to do is to make himself a bit more presentable. First off, he should drop the ‘Satanist’ thing. Satanists are nowhere near homicidal enough to be taken seriously.

Secondly, he needs to change the name of his cult from ‘Church of Euthanasia’ (too many negative connotations, especially the ‘Church’ bit) to something like…let’s see…’Earth Guard’. Yes, something like that.

Next, the hair. I see where he is going but it is actually a bit too scary. He needs a team of stylists to give him that immaculately unkempt, tousled look that suggests that he has just spent the last six weeks trekking through the Amazon basin while actually remaining clean, sexy and approachable.

While it is difficult to criticise a man’s wardrobe when he appears to be wearing nothing, he must, in fact, give a lot of thought to this. It is very important. He must dress in casual but expensive designer clothes (but avoiding anything pin-striped or which may smack of business). He must also learn to wear them without even a hint of self-consciousness, developing the kind of incidental nonchalance that says he does not spend even a second thinking about anything so trivial and consumerist as his appearance and that these designer togs all just fell on him as he unthinkingly walked past a wardrobe.

His name is good. He can keep that. It is appropriately ethnic and difficult to pronounce and will enable him to fabricate some cock-and-bull story about his native land and peoples being despoiled and plundered by the predations of the greedy, Western, warmongering profiteers. They will lap that stuff up on the college circuit and the less truth there is behind it the better. He can also keep his job title – “Outreach Director”. Nobody has the slightest idea who they are or what they are supposed to do but they get hosed down with money drawn from the public well. Why change that?

So, by taking his central idea of mass suicide for the sake of the planet while undergoing a few easily-achievable adjustments, this man could turn himself from a pariah into a much-admired ethical voice for decency in the midst of a wicked, uncaring world. Instead of being hounded by and pilloried in the press, he would find himself the subject of fawning editorials, his merest utterances carried away and borne forth into the popular lexicon almost before they have left his lips. He would be whisked off to every international climate jamboree where he would rub shoulders with all the governmental and non-governmental glitterati. He would be glad-handed by politicians who would earnestly seek his advice on framing their next round of legislation. He would be slobbered over by dewey-eyed Hollywood celebrities and the legions of vulnerable teenage followers that he seeks would flock to him in such numbers that he could never have imagined in his most flagrant flights of Satanist fantasy.

Yes, Nagasiva Yronwode is a man for our times. He just doesn’t know it yet.

Fear not Thaddeus. His organization is not the only Earth friendly death cult in town. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement has been around for many years. I have used http://www.vhemt.org(Link) as the information gateway to the man=virus movement, where, btw, someone has been brainstorming some not very voluntary solutions. Shop around. You’re certain to find a human specie hating “ethical voice for decency” over there.

It strikes me that if you are running a cult marketing aimed at the mainstream may not be what you want. The man’s appearance shouts to the disaffected young, “I’m different and interesting, not boring and a fount of conventional wisdom.”

The same tactic might also work if you were looking for a grant from some sorts of quango that have ‘diversity’ as one of their goals. He should approach the Arts Council.

Surely even the disaffected young would say “Not over my dead body” to this weirdo.

His hair style is part New Agey, part Rainforest Tribe Chic…and, let’s see, part Art Teacher in a ‘challenging’ inner-city comprehensive, with a nod in the direction of the international colours of Benetton thrown in with the grips for that cross-border appeal. It’s hair with attitude.

This pie-eyed piper is not so loony that he doesn’t include a disclaimer in his interview with the Telegraph. “I’m not the protector of these troubled youths…their parents are the people who made them troubled. They are responsible for them.”

But ol’ Charley Manson himself said much the same thing, didn’t he, at his trial...?

“These children that come at you with knives. they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up. . .”

I believe the “Church of Euthanasia” is, at least for most people, a joke, as is generally clear from its over-the-top slogans, such as their bumpersticker “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself.”

According to wikipedia:

The Church of Euthanasia (CoE) is a dadaist political organization started by Rev. Chris Korda in the Boston, Massachusetts area.

The CoE uses… satire and black humor to highlight Earth’s unsustainable population. The CoE is notorious for its conflicts with Pro-life Christian activists.

According to the church’s website, the one commandment is “Thou shalt not procreate”. The CoE further asserts four principle pillars: suicide, abortion, cannibalism (“strictly limited to consumption of the already dead”), and sodomy.

remembering the basics of my since rejected reeducation, this guy is the anti-honky. back when i was a kid trying to grow up in Ann Arbor I found out that the worst thing one could ever do was become a honky (or honkie if you insist). Never specifically defined, it meant that you had gone over to the dark side and had taken on the cultural aspects of THEM.
Therefore, despite this thing’s willingness to espouse your children’s demise, he gets a pass, cause he’s not a honky. honky.

For reasons of my own, I invite your attention to the fact that this person’s hair isn’t really very long. Actually having very long hair is a social commitment of some years. Shaving a gouge here or there, moussing it straight up, or applying a dozen pony-tail ties is a fun way to impress the gangbangers at the clubs, and is easily concealable as you spend your mornings humping flour sacks for The Man. Smooth out the ten-month beard, and this Hydish gentleman’s Jekyll could sell insurance or coach soccer (actually, recommended vocations for suicide cultists).

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